The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  "Where," he growled, "did the suggestion come from that this Board be injected into the park program?" From the wealthy people on Long Island who want the program to be controlled by an agency "easily subject to influence and manipulation." The Land Board had never even been mentioned in connection with parks until the Long Island State Park Commission proposed taking a little of their land.

  Slowly and carefully, the Governor spelled out his side of the Taylor Estate and Northern State Parkway fights, the need for park land on Long Island, the great natural beauty of the spot selected, the attitude of the opponents, a "few wealthy men," at the Biltmore hearing.

  "As between the few and the many to be benefited," Al Smith said, "I cast my lot with the many, and I signed the papers necessary to acquire the property by entry and appropriation. Immediately thereafter, high-priced legal talent was brought in to defeat the purposes of the state." It was from them and from their masters that the suggestion came to place the park program under the Land Board and to paralyze the program until this was done, because they knew that, "before the Land Board, the golf club would probably win."

  So, Smith said, "there is a greater question here than Park Councils, Attorney Generals or Land Boards. There is a question of what will ultimately become of the $15,000,000 authorized by the people. Will it buy choice park spots and locate parkways where there is fine air and scenic

  beauty, or will money, power and influence compel the state to buy for the people that which nobody else wants? The people are either going to get these parks and parkways through the properly organized commissions . . . or this program will be given into the hands of the very men who now desire to weaken it in the interests of the few . . ."

  And Al Smith wound up his speech as only Al Smith could. He was willing to leave the question to the people, he said. "I am laying it before them in plain everyday language and I am leaving it to them to serve notice on their servants and representatives in the Legislature just exactly what their wishes are," he said. "The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy. Let us battle it out right in the shadow of the capitol itself and let us have a decision, and let us not permit the impression to go abroad that wealth and the power that wealth can command can palsy the arm of the state."

  In his speech, Smith avoided discussing the legalities or constitutionality of the appropriation. And he avoided, except for a single passing reference, any mention of Robert Moses.

  The Republicans tried to shift the focus back to the Governor's controversial appointee and his actions. Replying on the radio the next evening, John Knight, Senate majority leader, said:

  The issue is one of law and order as against lawlessness and a violation of sacred constitutional property rights. With scarcely a dollar in sight or available for payment, Robert Moses, with the written approval of Governor Smith and with the aid of the State Police, seized property of the admitted value of $250,000 and excluded the owners from such property. The question as to the legality of that action is one for the courts, and it appears that the owners of this property have brought an action against Mr. Moses for large damages. That is the big reason why Mr. Moses is so much concerned at this time and why he wants an extra session and funds to pay for this property.

  It is, Knight said, because a curb is needed on such wanton abuse of power that a check by an outside body, such as the Land Board, is needed. The Legislature, he said, must "safeguard private property against future unlawful seizure." Attorney General Ottinger issued a statement detailing the "extravagance" of Moses' $63,000 expenditures for cars and office furnishings. But "sacred constitutional property rights" and the price of office furnishings weren't the issue to the steaming millions of New York City— or of the state's other cities. Twice more before the session Smith took to the air to speak, twice more he pounded on the theme of the few against the many, of wealth, privilege and influence against the masses, of parks against the millionaires' golf clubs. The mailboxes of legislators were situated in 1925 in the "midway," the corridor between Senate and Assembly Chambers on the third floor of the capitol. Each morning, as reporters headed for the legislative chambers, they could see those mailboxes. After each of Smith's speeches, the mailboxes were overflowing with letters and postcards supporting the Governor.

  And the press didn't help the Republicans. June 1925 was a hot news month. John Thomas Scopes was being tried in the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, and among the two million words a day being telegraphed out of Dayton were enough to fill endless columns in the New York papers. More page-one columns were devoted to speculation over the fate of Roald Amundsen, whose expedition to the North Pole hadn't been heard from in four weeks, until on June 19 the Times could report amundsen back safe. But in New York and other cities of New York State, no story was big enough to knock the park fight off page one. The Times, for example, carried during the thirty days of June twenty-eight park-fight stories, seven in the lead spot, as well as a long summary in its Sunday magazine, reprints in full of the texts of the long speeches by Smith and Knight, and eight editorials. The editorials of all the big-city papers—with the exception of the New York Herald Tribune, notorious during the latter part of the 1920's for its espousal of the upper-class viewpoint—seemed to be vying with one another in whipping up public support for the Governor's stand. The Times, in its only direct confrontation with the issue Macy considered important in the fight, said that perhaps Moses had broken the law, but that there were more important principles involved than that. "It seems not unlikely that Chairman Moses has exceeded his legal authority. But he is acting in the interest of the people at large and of all future generations. ..."

  The support for Smith and Moses spilled off the editorial pages into the supposedly impartial news columns. The paper in which this tendency was most striking was the Times, both because the paper strove so diligently for objectivity on other issues and because of its reputation. ("The Times was the bible, emerging each morning with a view of life that thousands of readers accepted as reality," its biographer, Gay Talese, was to write. "They accepted it on the simple theory that what appeared in the Times must be true.") The slanting in the Times's initial story on the Taylor Estate fight—the verbatim recitation of all Moses' points and the burying of Macy's—was not corrected in succeeding stories. Stories about court developments—which were unfavorable to Moses—were kept short and relegated to inside pages. Van Siclen's flat statement that the appropriation was illegal and a violation of both law and the constitutions of the state and nation was on page twenty-one, and it was exactly five paragraphs long. More favorable stories on political developments were front-paged and allowed to run interminably.

  It was not just a case of inequality in space and play. The Times's articles repeated, day after day, as if they were uncontested facts, the key contentions made by Moses and Smith. Story after story, for example, contained some version of the following paragraph:

  Wealthy members of the Timber Point Golf Club used social and political influence to try to get the Commissioners to withdraw. That failing, they created the Pauchogue Land Corporation and bought the estate.

  The key contentions of Moses' opponents were almost totally ignored. Only the most diligent readers of the Times could understand, for example, that the fact that Moses had appropriated the property without money to pay for

  it was of importance; the fact was hardly ever mentioned, and the mentions it was given were fleeting. When Ottinger revealed Moses' $63,000 expenditures for "overhead," the Times buried the story on an inside page and handled it this way:

  Albany—What is considered here as an attempt at retaliation by Republicans on Governor Smith for his veto of the Thayer State Park bill is contained in a letter of censure sent by Attorney General Ottinger to Robert Moses.

  Moses' reply attacked the Attorney General for delays in searching title for proposed park acquisitions; it all but ignored the "overhead." A Times editorial said: "Chairman Moses' reply is a model of moderate
statement." As the crucial special session neared, the Times began to resemble a Democratic house organ. Its article on the eve of the session said: "The Governor believes in parks. He loves them. . . . The Governor is well aware that he has a stiff battle ahead and is preparing to meet the situation with his usual vigor and undaunted courage." His motives for calling the special session, "a contest that may add a new epic to the annals of the State," the article said, were clear: "an abiding faith that the public can force this legislation in its own interest." Other possible motives—such as an upcoming, all but indefensible court action—were never mentioned.

  Part of the explanation for the Times's attitude was the friendship of Adolph S. Ochs, the self-made man from Knoxville who had become its owner and guiding spirit, with the self-made man from the Fourth Ward. During the 1920's, Smith regularly spent summer weekends at Ochs's summer home on Lake George.

  Part was the intense interest of Ochs, his only living child, Iphigene, Iphigene's husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Sulzberger's niece-in-law, Mrs. Cyrus L. Sulzberger—of a whole clutch of Ochses and Sulzbergers, in fact —in parks. The old patriarch himself took a particular interest in preserving the Saratoga Battlefield; in 1927, Moses, trying to buy up those portions not yet owned by the state, would find himself short of money—and Ochs would purchase two key parcels and hold them for the state until the money was available. In 1925, Mrs. Cyrus L. Sulzberger was active in the Park Association of New York City. Iphigene, a somber-eyed and idealistic young matron deeply concerned with social problems, had already begun to channel the idealism—and a remarkable amount of enthusiasm and energy that was concealed but not muted by her serene manners and gentle voice—into Park Association work. She had been, she would tell the author forty years later, "thrilled" by Moses' state park work and anxious that the city should also get moving, and in 1925 she was active on a Park Association committee that was mapping a vast city land-acquisition program —and that listened raptly to Moses, who had agreed to help them work it out.

  The feeling of the publisher and his family showed up in the news columns of the Times probably not as a result of any direct orders to editors or reporters but as the result of their understandable sensitivity to their

  bosses' feelings. Albert L. Warner, one of the paper's Albany reporters, recalls: "Parks and conservation—they were dear to Mr. Ochs's heart and consequently dear to the hearts of Times editors. So I was on the lookout for any attempt to interfere with parks. Not that I had specific instructions to do so, but the editors would react favorably to park and conservation stories, so the reporter naturally keeps his eyes alert for stories of this type." When, in 1931, Ochs received the annual award of the Park Association, the lettering on the illuminated scroll said: "The New York Times, under his leadership, has made itself the mouthpiece of friends of the parks, using its great influence to educate the public to an understanding of the place of the parks in modern life."

  Whatever the reason, the daily press coverage of the park fight made Smith and Moses look very good—and the Republican legislators look very bad.

  The Republican legislators realized this. Faced with an election campaign in November, many of those from New York and downstate districts began to panic. But Hillies and GOP national committeeman George K. Morris, representatives of the powers that ran the party, traveled to Albany and held them in line with naked threats and blandishments. And the upstate legislators didn't have to be concerned about November. One-man, one-vote upstate agitation was decades in the future; these legislators represented New York State's rotten boroughs: districts whose voters numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands, and who were farmers who had no interest in parks and who were, moreover, fanatically opposed to government spending. The idea of spending millions for parks had appalled them in the first place; the bond referendum might have rolled up a statewide majority of more than a million, but, with a single exception, Ulster, where old park philanthropist Judge Alphonse Trumpbore Clearwater took the stump for it, every upstate county had voted against it. Upstate New York in 1925 was a stronghold of Prohibitionism, of Protestantism, of prejudice, of Ku Klux Klannism—and of Republicanism. Opposing Smith's park policies could only help upstate Republican legislators, not hurt them. As the legislators arrived in Albany for the special session, bitter against being called to the capitol in the summer heat, reporters asked them if there was any chance of a change in their position. "We'll melt in our seats first," one said. When a reporter asked Knight if he might change his mind, Knight replied, "I don't change my mind very often, do I?"

  Nonetheless, Smith smote them hip and thigh. The Republicans held a majority of seven in the Senate and forty-two in the Assembly; he had to switch four votes in the Senate and twenty-two votes in the Assembly to win. He sent Moses and other emissaries to the Republican members of the State Council of Parks, the old men who had been fighting for parks for decades, and asked them to intercede with the legislators from their districts. The park philanthropists were men who ordinarily had influence in Republican councils; no legislator from a district anywhere near the headwaters of the Hudson dared publicly to oppose Judge Clearwater's wishes. At a Republican caucus, the park philanthropists spoke one after the other; not

  a single legislator dared openly to argue against them, but they had their orders; a reporter wrote that, when the speeches were finished, "the Republican leaders sat speechless, until they finally filed their terse refusal to reconsider and quit the conference."

  Persuasion having failed, the Governor tried other methods. Westchester, he saw, was a weak spot in the Republican wall: Boss William Ward wanted a new charter for the county, one that would centralize its government under his thumb, and the necessary county referendum on the charter could be authorized only by Legislature—and Governor. A bill authorizing the referendum happened even then to be awaiting Smith's signature or veto. Moses paid a visit to Ward and one of Ward's senators, Seabury C. Mastick. Smith signed the bill—and soon political observers were reporting that Ward had promised Smith the votes of the seven legislators he controlled, and that Mastick might even introduce the park bill Smith wanted.

  The Citizens Union and City Club reformers had great influence with Republican legislators from New York City. Smith sent Moses to see them. The younger reformers admired Moses; many of the older men were disenchanted with him, but they believed in the cause for which he was fighting, and they rallied to it: "Park development. . . should be determined by sound principles. These sound principles, the Citizens Union believes, were outlined by the State Council of Parks." With reformers who still had doubts, Smith lent a hand. When, in a chat in the City Club lounge, lawyer Joseph M. Price told Moses that perhaps a central supervisory body such as the Land Board wasn't a bad idea, Moses excused himself, went to a telephone and called Smith in Albany—and hardly had the chat ended when Price received a telegram from the Governor explaining why .the Land Board idea was bad. Reformer William B. Roulstone boarded a train to Buffalo, in a single day persuaded the Buffalo Council of Catholic Women, the Buffalo Civic Club and the Buffalo Central Labor Council to pass resolutions supporting Smith's stand—and then headed for Syracuse and a dozen other upstate cities and towns. The upstate park philanthropists were out working, too, old Judge Clearwater himself driving night after night to little villages to talk on their local radio stations, Franklin D. Roosevelt of Hyde Park assailing "the invisible hand behind the . . . Republican . . . policy."

  Then Smith and Mrs. Moskowitz conceived a master stroke: they told Moses to call a meeting of the seventy-three regional park commissioners and to hold it in the Executive Chamber at 2 p.m. June 22—just six hours before the opening of the special session—a move that insured that the influential commissioners would be on hand during the session, available to bring further pressure on wavering legislators, and to dramatize to press and public the contrast between the attitude of the Legislature and of men genuinely interested in parks. GOP leaders pleade
d with the commissioners not to attend, telling them that they were working against their own party, but the old men were loyal to their parks. They canceled vacation and business trips, and all but nineteen of the seventy-three were present, packed into the visitors' gallery of the Assembly Chamber along with the largest

  crowd the Chamber had ever held, as Smith, speaking not from the raised Speaker's chair but in the well of the Chamber, a spot where he had stood so many times before, stood so close to the senators seated on folding chairs brought in specially for the occasion that he could touch them. And he told them: You created the State Parks Council. I kept politics out of it by appointing to it these men, mostly Republicans. They include some of the greatest men in the state. And it's their plan, not mine, that you're killing. Smith's speech brought the packed galleries to their feet cheering. Smith had asked the Legislature for permission to have his speech broadcast; it had not dared refuse. Four microphones had been set up in the Assembly Chamber well, and as the cheers thundered down on the legislators, they could look at the microphones and know that they were being echoed throughout the state.

  But when the Republican legislators emerged from behind the closed and guarded doors of their caucus, not a single one—not one from New York City, not even one from Westchester County—was still supporting Smith. Not only would the GOP not segregate the funds Smith had asked for, but by a straight party-line vote, the Legislature repassed the identical bill that Smith had vetoed. With the Legislature confronted by an outpouring of public pressure as great as any in the state's history, the barons of Long Island had laid down the law to the lawmakers—and their orders had been obeyed.

  The roll call in the Senate was completed at 5 p.m., in the Assembly at 6:30. At exactly 7 p.m., the Governor again vetoed the bill, in a sequence that a Times reporter wrote "is likely to set a mark in legislative history for the record-breaking speed with which it went the route from legislative approval to executive condemnation."